MARPOL VI

[jmw]

I am curious and hope someone can enlighten me.

For some years now the concept of “unmanned machinery space” has been gaining ground. Despite the ever increasing sophistication of ship's engines, the engines are increasingly low maintenance “fit-and-forget” items.

At this time CIMAC are reporting on the proposed new ISO 8217 fuel standard. This standard will define the sulphur content, among other things.

MARPOL VI sets out the requirements and includes the need for a certificate to be provided when bunkering fuel. This certificate will define the sulphur content. If that is so why, in this extract (from this article on MARPOL VI:

http://www.marinetech.ncl.ac.uk/res...d compliance with sulphur cap regulations.pdf

) do we find:

“A review of the existing sulphur in fuel measurement technology has shown that most
of the detection techniques are through combustion of a small quantity of fuel
(oxidative techniques) and needs a sample of fuel to be extracted from the system for
a test to be completed. This can be avoided by fitting an X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF)
on line measuring instrument upstream of the inlet to the engine. However, the cost of
such instrument is approximately £40,000 with additional costs for calibration and on
going maintenance by an expert technician. The analysers capable of measuring SOx
in the exhaust gas can be divided into extractive and non-extractive system, the
former being permanently installed in a remote location analysing gas samples
extracted from the uptake with capability of measuring emissions from multiple
engines, and the latter carrying out in-situ analysis without extraction. The analysers
are of the UV fluorescence type using a zinc ray lamp as the UV source.”

(FIA 100: Fuel ignition analyser (

http://www.fueltech.no/FIA Pages/FIA-100 concept.htm)

On X-RAY Fluorescence:

http://www.amptek.com/xrf.html

, and, as an example of the equipment available.

http://www.jobinyvon.co.uk/ukdivisions/Emission/slfa2800.htm

)

Does this mean that irrespective of what the certificate says is in the fuel, it must be measured again in the feed to the engine?
From the article above this may mean that despite replacing all maintenance-intensive high-skills equipment with low-maintenance and low-skills equipment now there will be a requirement to install high-skills high-maintenance instruments to monitor something that has already been certified?

One has to admit the problems with blending to specification and with fraudulent supply, thought there are solutions to this. Even if we consider just the one solution, pre-blended and pre-tested fuels such as the oil majors supply from major ports, we surely can assume such fuels can be properly certified, so is such instrumentation going to be necessary or mandatory?

Anyone know the answers?

JMW

http://www.viscoanalyser.com

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